About Tom Foremski

Recent Posts by Tom Foremski

De Young Museum: Real Sidewalks and Gaultier’s Version of the Sidewalk

(Photos by Tom Foremski.)

Dan was walking along the sidewalk outside the de Young museum, which is staging “Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” (you can see the white lettering by his shoulder).

I asked him where was going, he said he was marching, on a forced march, you know how it is. I said I did, I said we are all marching, even when we don’t want to, the march of time marches us on. He smiled and we passed on.

He smiled and we passed each other, heading to different destinations even though we all eventually arrive at the same place…

He seemed to appear from nowhere and he looked like a work of art, the remains of colored tattered plastic bags were his bracelet, and his coat pulled together with a loop of another plastic bag.

When I first arrived in California in late 1984, the first thing that struck me was how many homeless lived in such a rich country. That’s true for Gaultier’s France these days, too. Last December in Paris, there were many sleeping on the streets above warm air grates.

I’m positive we’ll eventually get to a solution. A YC startup will eventually make an app for it.

Here’s another unfortunate soul, around the corner from the de Young:

Here’s Gaultier’s version of the “sidewalk.”

 

 

Culture Watch: The Extraordinary World of Jean Paul Gaultier – at the de Young

(Photos by Tom Foremski.)

Friday evening I was at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate park to see The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.

The museum is on a roll with its exhibits of leading fashion designers. The Vivienne Westwood show was fantastic, and the Balenciaga exhibit last year was even better. And this one is extraordinary, the best so far.

It’s a superb curation and the presentation the work of designer Jean Paul Gaultier, dubbed “fashion’s enfant terrible” is fantastically creative. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

The mounting, the display, the lighting are superbly tuned to the works displayed — the de Young’s staff should be congratulated for their skill in building this exhibit.

Sport is Theater: Bollywood Night At Warriors vs Mavericks

(The spectacular Oracle Arena.)

It was a dark and stormy evening but it was also Bollywood Night at the Oracle Arena in Oakland and I had two tickets to see the Golden State Warriors play the Dallas Mavericks — thanks to Tibco Software.

[Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of Tibco, is one of the owners of the Warriors, and the first Indian-American NBA team owner. The scrappy kid from Mumbai has done very well, arriving as a teenager in Silicon Valley many years before the recent waves of Indian engineers.

Vivek Ranadivé is also one of the most interesting personalities in Silicon Valley. I knew him when I worked at the Financial Times and he became one of my most important contacts because of his long history and extensive contacts within the valley. When I left the Financial Times he took a keen interest in my publishing venture. Tibco became a founding sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher in 2005, and has remained our most loyal supporter. I hope my readers appreciate Tibco's important contribution to SVW.]

I’d never been to an NBA game and was looking forward to it immensely. I set off with my son Matt, and we braved the nasty cats and dogs weather, driving across the bridge to Oakland. And I’m glad we did because we had a brilliant time. Here’s a taste of the event:

 

The Warrior Girls, the Golden State Warriors’ cheerleaders got into the Bollywood spirit with colorful costumes.

Sport is theater…

 

The first person we ran into was Cory (Scoop) Johnson (above with Tim Draper) CNBC’s original Silicon Valley reporter. He now works for Bloomberg TV.

 

Tim Draper, founder of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is as well known for his eccentric personality as he is for his VC prowess.

Al Seracevic, sports editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, quickly took Matt and I under his wing and gave us for a whirlwind tour of the benches and the media balcony. It great catching up with Al, I hadn’t seen him since a very late and very liquid North Beach adventure about a year ago.

It was also good to bump into

Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite, who had a great seat down on the court.

 

Vivek Ranadivé’s daughter Anjali (on screen above) sang the national anthem.

 

The Dallas bench…

 

Here’s where the sports hacks perch.

 

Elevator to the Grandview Suites.

 

A very spirited crowd.

 

The always hardworking Tibco Comms team.

 

A rainy treck home.

Gastronomy Night at San Francisco’s Exploratorium – Exploring the Science of Food

I love any excuse to go to the Palace of Fine Arts and visit The Exploratorium — two of my favorite places in San Francisco.

On the first Thursday of every month The Exploratorium hosts its “After Dark Presents” series of unique events. This month the theme was gastronomy and several thousand people turned up for lectures, tastings, demonstrations, and to play around with The Exploratorium’s marvelous, hands-on science exhibits.

The invention of cooking must rank as one the most powerful technologies ever developed by our species and its ancestors. We essentially found a way to outsource much of the work of our stomachs to the cooking pot.

This led to a massive change in our evolution — our stomachs shrank and our body changed, it helped us walk upright, and we grew giant brains because now we were able to support their prodigious energy needs — more than 25% of our calories feed our grey matter.

If we didn’t have the cooking pot we would not be able to digest the large amount of raw food we’d need — we would have to spend all day gathering, chomping, and chewing.

It’s not easy extracting calories from raw food. An experiment at Bristol zoo in the UK, with human volunteers fenced into a pastoral paradise, and fed their daily calorie requirements in raw foods, such as berries, vegetables, meat, had to be shut down after a couple of weeks because the people were losing so much weight they were becoming malnourished and could have died. They physically could not eat enough raw food to meet their daily needs.

Without the outsourcing of much of the work of our stomachs to the cooking pot there’d be little time time for society, and no time for developing civilizations. There’d be no science, literature, or the arts, there’d be no computer technologies.

(Today we are in the midst of the next step in our evolution — outsourcing much of the work of our brains to computing machines. This will have a similarly large effect on our development as did the invention of cooking and it will completely change how we look and behave. We’ll have smaller brains but we’ll be a whole lot smarter, healthier, and better looking :)

The development of gastronomy must easily rank as our oldest and most important technology — it’s a perfect subject for The Exploratorium. Quynth Tran, a former newspaper reporter now working on the PR team at The Exploratorium showed me around the event.

She says that the “After Dark Series” has been very successful and the concept has been followed by other museums. The California Academy of Sciences set up a competing Thursday night event called “Nightlife.” (My favorite evening museum event is the superb “Friday Nights” series at the de Young Museum.)

I’m not a fan of “Nightlife” but I did enjoy this “After Dark” event, it attracted a lively, curious, and great looking crowd. Ms Tran says that it will become a weekly event when The Exploratorium moves to its new location.

Another enjoyable feature was that it was largely free of the tech industry people I see all the time, my “Highlight” app barely blipped all night.

If you want to leave the echo chamber for some very enjoyable hours, this is a great place to come on the first Thursday of the month.

Next month the theme is “The World of Your Senses.”

The US premiere of a special exhibition of Tibetan thangka style paintings and engage with Tibetan monks from India to explore sensory perception through Buddhist and scientific perspectives.

 

Here are some photos from the Gastronomy evening:

(Photos by Tom Foremski.)

A long line for one of the lectures.

A demonstration on the main stage is about to begin.

 

A rapt audience.

 

There’s lots to explore.

 

The sand isn’t edible but there were a lot of other things to taste.

 

An exploration of our taste for sweet foods.

Comparing notes…

 

Hodo Soy from above.

The Hodo Soy tasting was very popular, unfortunately I missed out :(

The Exploratorium is a giant playground: blowing giant bubbles.

 

This is how tornadoes get their twist.

Heading home…

I’ll miss the incredible setting of The Exploratorium when it moves to its new location at the Embarcadero. I’ve been coming here more than 25 years, and I used to bring my kids here constantly.

I hope the new Exploratorium building won’t be the dud that the California Academy of Sciences ended up with. It spent $500 million to replace a building of great character, and one that housed far more exhibits than it’s ghastly replacement.

It now costs a fortune to get in, $30, while providing far less content. It’s a disaster. I don’t care that it’s a platinum rated “green” building. There is nothing Green about spending half-a-billion dollars, sugar coated with a “living roof” — featuring local species. I have plenty of local species living under my fridge.

It’s built as a citadel with no public spaces, unlike the de Young across the concourse in Golden Gate Park, which has one-third of its exhibit space in public areas! You can see experience great art, sit in its sculpture parks, without paying a cent.

The California Academy of Sciences has a six-foot high metal fence and no public spaces! The huge cost of its building means it must charge members to attend its Thursday night ‘Nightlife’ events, while the de Young ‘Friday Night’ events are free to everyone. (The Exploratorium events are free to members.)

The contrast between the two institutions, as they face each other in Golden Gate Park, is striking: one is exclusive and the other is inclusive.

It’s bad design and it’s a bad message for today’s world. We all agree that science education is incredibly important but here, the California Academy of Sciences, has become far less accessible. It’s walled off its incredible treasure trove of collections and muted a great story of more than 100 years of important scientific research and discovery. Hopefully, this can be fixed in some way.

- – -

When the de Young reopened in October 2005, it was open for the whole weekend – 48 hours. The line to get in stretched for miles. I joined the line late on Saturday and I was half-a-mile away from the entrance. I had so much fun in the line, the people, the conversations, the surroundings, all made for a great time.

I have a dream of an annual event where the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum stay open for 48 hours straight — starting Friday evening to Sunday evening. There would be tons of events, lectures, music, lots of things happening in the concourse between the two buildings…

There would be streams of people coming and going between events, it would be a heady mix for the senses and the mind. It would be a unique city festival — a celebration of the arts and natural sciences — an island of reason and logic in an increasingly fragile world, threatened by rising levels of ignorance and superstition.

It would be a great event.

 

TEDxBerkeley 2012: Inspiring Innovation

TEDxBerkeley 2012 was a Saturday well spent…

I know the people that organize TEDxSF pretty well but this was my first time at TEDxBerkeley, which was held in the Zellerbach auditorium on the University of California campus.

The audience was very young compared with the much older audience for TEDxSF. The two events could maybe trade some attendees, it’s always great to see young students.

 

While I waited for the event to begin I chatted with Carlos Olguin, head of the Nanotechnology Group at Autodesk. I heard about Autodesk’s plans for design software for life itself. He and one of the researchers at UC Berkeley showed me some petri dishes with genetically modified e.coli bacteria.

 

Here are some e.coli that have been genetically modified to smell like banana. I was asked if I’d like to smell it,

I declined. These e. coli are a weakened strain that cannot survive for long outside of the lab, but I didn’t want to chance it affecting my own gut flora, which are genetically modified to smell like roses.

 

DeCadence kicked off the event with some great a cappella singing.

 

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk spoke about innovation. I loved what he said. He spoke about how corporations want to be innovative but that innovation is not their territory. Innovation is created by rule breakers and risk takers. The modern corporation is designed to impose rules and minimize risks. Well said.

 

Connie Duckworth was very impressive. She is a retired partner and MD of Goldman Sachs, where she was named the first woman sales and trading partner in the firm’s history. She spoke about her work as founder ofAzru Studio Hope, a non-profit focused on helping women in Afghanistan find work and earn money for their families.

 

Nipun Mehta, the founder of ServiceSpace, spoke about a concept he calls “Giftivism” which is a “Gift Economy.” He shared some stories about Indian villages. Interestingly, he did not mention the Burning Man community, which has been practicing a “Gift Economy” for more than 20 years.

 

(Above, Renee Blodgett, co-curator of TEDxBerkeley, focuses on Gopi Kallayil.)

Gopi Kallayil, head of Google Plus, the latest and sometimes controversial social network spoke about the lives that Google Plus has saved, or at least, saved an injured girl from paralysis because he was able to hook up surgeons with local doctors over the service.

Mr Kallayil is a prize winning Toastmaster, he gave a great performance.

 

Charles Holt spoke about being fired, rather as a friend described it, “released” from a job at IBM and finding his true calling as a singer.

 

Jodi Lomask and Capacitor kicked of the second session of the event.

David Ewing Duncan spoke about health and pollutants. He said that China’s coal-fired power stations send plumes of mercury laden pollution via the jet stream to California. His company is launching consumer test kits that will reveal mercury levels. He shared his own results from eating two meals of locally caught fish, which showed elevated levels.

 

Tapan Parikh, assistant professor at the School of Information Technology spoke about his trip to India and his adventures helping small villages.

 

Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards, spoke about her film projects, which are crowd-sourced around subjects such as our interconnectedness. She showed a short film of people from around the world sharing their views.

 

Robert Strong began the third session of the day with a great demonstration of close up magic.

 

Maria Fadiman was very entertaining, sharing stories of her work as an ethnobotanist. I wish, when I was growing up, such profession existed because it sounds like fascinating research.

 

 

Dr. Neha Sangwan could barely keep her emotions in check as she shared her stories of her encounters with people such as the King of Bahrain. Most of her presentation consisted of her recounting story after story of people telling her how brilliant, young, and talented she is. They must be right.

 

Ken Goldberg talked about his life-long interest in robots and how robots can make us better at being humans.

 

Lindsey Stirling finished the show with an energetic display of violin playing while dancing at a whirlwind pace around the stage.

 

 

I had a great time. I love the local TEDx events but sometimes I wish that they were a little bit more unique and risk taking.

 

I’ve always felt that the ‘x’ should stand for experimental — what else could you do in that 18 minute presentation window? Too often, little TED tries to ape big TED, and the presenters seem like they are auditioning for the main show in regional competitions.

I love the gaps between the talks, the chance to meet others. For example, during lunch I had a fascinating conversation with a research chemist working on developing artificial photosynthesis. It’s those experiences that count and make it worthwhile to attend, otherwise you can view it from home via a live stream for free.

 

 

Above, Kevin Gong, curator of TEDxBerkeley, and co-curators Renee Blodgett (right) and R. Jennifer Barr, were the lead organizers of the event.

The event was co-sponsored by Pearltrees, appbaker, and LiveStream.

If you’d like to explore more information about the event and the speakers you can browse this Pearltree:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Searching For Race In Social Media

Dana Oshiro, publishing analyst at ad network NetShelter, poses an interesting question: “how do you determine race and ethnicity online? ”

This question arose from her recent attendance at the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit in San Jose, CA where plans were discussed on how to use social media and online marketing to target the Hispanic population. The goal is to offer programs that will raise the number of Hispanic students in colleges by 4.5 million over the next ten years.

Could Buildings Be Improved If They Were Designed Like A Web App?

David Galbraith has embarked on a fascinating journey, exploring the notion that the flow of people and their interactions inside buildings, is similar in design to the flow of data and user interaction of Web apps.

Could best practices in Web app design be applied to architectural design?

Dave is a buddy and he belongs to what is a very small group of people I know, who are both insightful and foresightful, about the tremendous changes that our digital technologies are creating around us. In this essay: Use Case Study House #1 – A house designed like a web application he offers a home floor plan (above) that looks very much like a flowchart for designing a web application:

The title is a play on the Case Study Houses of the 1940s. It’s not a UX design but a UX inspired one.

…

Many architects tend to think of buildings as objects, the greatest ones, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, often thought about them as interconnected spaces but they focused on the spaces rather than the flow through them – this is analogous to looking at the stage set rather than the choreography.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to design a building like you would choreograph a dance – so that the end design was a picture of a person moving rather than the environment and where if that was sophisticated enough the environment would be defined by the person’s movement.
…

Web design is very linear, its all about flow and eliminating the niche, to get the bulk of people through a primary use case.

I’m intrigued by Dave’s approach to architecture, it’s one that is long overdue. Examples of great architecture seem to be always about image, loud statements about wealth, importance, or aesthetic panache. Architectural prizes reward a beauty that’s nearly always skin deep, and rarely judge how well a design supports the actual work of a building. Apps are always judged on how well they work.

Dave’s approach is sound and very sensible and it got me thinking: what would result if say you considered a home, or an office, as a container for a collection of life apps – a platform, an operating system (OS). Each app has a specific user interface but each having to share databases, processes, and the constraints of their hardware.

For example, a home or office building, is like an iPhone platform that runs apps such as Laundry, Cook, WatchTV, Exercise, Sleep, Work, etc. Each app has its own user interface designed for that specific activity but each shares the same restrictions defined by the building, the OS, such as the size of kitchen, building codes, etc.

Smaller homes would require different designs but each “Home OS” or “Office OS” would result in floor plans optimized to the available resources, and user loads, similar to the way apps are adapted for different sized displays, processor speeds, and network services.

Architectural designs that work well for one user, would surely work well for many, providing a scaling factor similar to the design of good software, which should attract entrepreneurial activity in licensing effective designs.

Testing out web apps is easy – testing out home or work spaces is not. Which means progress will be slow.

However, it should be possible to identify what works and what doesn’t from what has already been built. Cheap sensors could capture masses of data about people flow in buildings and homes. Algorithms could quickly identify what works well and map it against its architecture. Best use cases could be quickly identified and improved in future designs.

It’s using big datasets in a similar way that web app developers analyze Internet traffic flows and millions of user interactions, to identify what works best.

I hope other architects take notice of Dave’s experiment. I hear that unemployment rates are the highest in their profession – which means there’s a lot of them sitting around with time on their hands.

My advice: take a free Code Academy or Google online programming course, so you can start to familiarize yourself with the best principles of web app design. (And if you design future homes or offices please include this tiny detail: a usb charger plug alongside every power socket!)

 

Cloud Computing Is Driving A Digital Arts Renaissance

While cloud computing may be nothing more than pie in the sky to some, a smaller creative agency in Berkeley, CA, believes it is driving a real renaissance in the digital arts. John McNeil Studio recently began using on-demand datacenter processing power to help it make computer-generated animations. The agency discovered that it could create high-quality animations in less time at a reasonable price if it offloaded the rendering process to a cloud computing service.

“I could never compete or be able to deliver something at the level of a Pixar or a Disney, given what I have at my disposal inside the walls of the studio,” said John McNeil, the chief creative officer and founder of the digital arts and communication company.

“But if I factor in the cloud, all of a sudden I can go there,” he said. “And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.”

(John McNeil, left). In September, John McNeil Studio was asked to create an immersive, 3-D animation using origami art to illustrate how a laptop unleashes human creativity. J. Watson, co-director of image and motion at McNeil, knew that the studio’s eight MacBook Pros wouldn’t allow it to meet the 2-month deadline.

“To make things move like paper, to model characters in 3-D that look like they could’ve been made from paper and then have the whole thing come together in a way that’s natural and tells a story is a big challenge,” said Watson. “And it required lots of computer-crunching power to render graphic images into motion.”

The need for compute horsepower led Watson and co-director Brandon Kuchta to try Amazon’s EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. The Amazon service allowed the McNeil team to access the processing power of hundreds of computers to simultaneously render several phases of the animation project and dial up or down the amount of processing power and storage space used for each phase.

“With Amazon, it’s pay as you go, so we can fire up 300 machines at once,” said Kuchta. “If we needed them just for a few hours, that’s all we would pay for and then we would spin them down until we needed them again.”

In contrast, the upfront cost of building an in-house render farm can seem astronomical.

“With just eight machines, you could be looking at $50,000,” said Kuchta. With only four big projects a year, he said that kind of investment might not be fully utilized.

“The cloud helped us finish in a timely manner,” said Watson. “We had 9,000 hours of rendering that had to take place. On one machine, that takes a year and yet we had a week to do the rendering phase of this particular project. If we were to try and render this project on our internal render farm, we’re talking more like 6 weeks to render everything.”

“We now realize that we have a big behemoth behind us that can render just about anything we throw at it,” said Watson. “We don’t have to lower quality or spend so much time fine tuning how long something is going to render; we actually can just get it going and move on to the next scene.”

From Big to Tiny Screens and in Between

“We’re seeing more and more artistic expressions that are borne out of the technology,” said McNeil. “There’s a much closer relationship between how you’re creating the art at the onset and how it’s going to be deployed digitally as an interactive program.”

Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at Altimeter, isn’t seeing a rise in demand for high-production animations by advertisers.

“End users don’t have the latest browser or hardware required to play cutting-edge experiences,” she said. But she says that Immersive Lab’sinteractive retail billboard, Intel’s Museum of Me and even Burger King’s Subservient Chicken are just a few examples of companies creating engaging digital experiences, which are often designed for TV or the Internet, and sometimes both.

Hype or Game Changer

According to the Cisco Cloud Index, there will be 12 times more cloud computing traffic processed inside datacenters by 2015 compared with the amount of traffic in 2010. Yet Jon Peddie, a technology analyst and president of JPR research, doesn’t see cloud services as a major disruptor to the digital arts industry. Rather, he says it has more to do with Moore’s Law, which generally states that computing performance continues to increase over time while the cost drops.

“Using servers on a demand basis is certainly more economical than having your own rendering farm and the incumbent support and overhead associated with it,” Peddie said. “But there is no free lunch,” he warned. “All potentially faster and cheaper rendering does is move the problem to another part of the pipeline.”

Peddie points to Blinn’s Law, which states that as technology advances, rendering time remains constant because rather than using improvements in hardware to save time, artists tend to employ it to render more complex graphics. The axiom is named for Jim Blinn, a computer scientist who created animations for NASA’s Voyager project and worked on the Carl Sagan “Cosmos” documentaries.

McNeil says that the business model for his studio simply would not work without affordable technologies like cloud clouding, and increasingly sophisticated consumer-level software and hardware available today.

“This allows me to have designers working next to motion graphics people, working next to people doing web development, working next to people finishing video, working next to people editing video, working next to people writing scripts,” McNeil said. “And that creates a really interesting opportunity for us.”

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